Interview with David Buuck in The Conversant

Thanks to Caleb Beckwith and The Conversant for publishing this interview I conducted with David Buuck! 

I think also about unlearning as much as deskilling, to let go of mastery as the threshold of the literary and let the materials and questions lead the work. Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff have written about inexpertise as a method—“inexpert investigation” is one way they phrase it—and I find their line of thinking about research and poetics compelling. At the same time, it’s a delicate balance between forging forms of politically committed work through methodologies of deskilled inexpertise (‘rigorous amateurism’ I’ve called it elsewhere) and simply half-assing a bunch of genres/media one has only half-studied & calling oneself a cross-genre performance artist or whatever. And of course to then try to corral everything into a book, when so much of the work exists off the page, either at/on specific sites or in/as time-based performances, means that failure is inherent in the book form. Could we unlearn the book?--David Buuck